I found a very interesting article (in French, that is for ou Styles !...) about the origin of the modern language policy in Ukraine and the origins of the present war...
https://www.axl.cefan.ulaval.ca/europe/ ... e_de_2014_
I will try to summarize it here...
To make it very short, since the end of the XVIIIth century, the tsars, then the Soviet Union (since Stalin), carried out very important actions of russification then of sovietisation in Ukraine. This included simply the prohibition of teaching, but also of the language and grammar of the Ukrainian language, derived from the old Ruthenian.
In reality the actual phenomenon seems to be a very recent movement of "de-Sovietization" of place names in Ukraine (2016) and as an extension of cultural and linguistic disputes since 2014, as power shifts in favor of pro-Ukrainians.
The 'fire at the powder keg' was, following the impeachment of Viktor Yanukovych (2014), the project of repealing of a 2012 law that allowed the recognition at the local level of regional languages (official bilingualism – Kivalov-Kolesnichenko law )... Its purpose was the preservation of Russian against Ukrainian. At that time the law was adopted by a pro-Russian parliamentary majority against the opinion of the majority of the Ukrainian speaking deputies. The granting of "regional language" status to Russian was effectively equivalent to making any other language as official as Ukrainian.
This attempted repeal of the law by the Ukrainian Parliament, immediately after the flight of former (Putin puppet...) president Viktor Yanukovych on February 23, 2014, was immediately instrumentalized and recuperated by Russia, which saw it as an extremely provocative gesture against the "Russian-speaking population" of Ukraine and as one of the justifications for the annexing of Crimea and the outbreak of hostilities in the Donbass.
Under the leadership of the next president (Oleksandr Turchynov) a parliamentary working group was hastily set up to write a new law on the status of regional languages... But the damage was done and since dictator Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has not ceased to justify his actions, including the annexing of Crimea in reference to what he denounces, without shame, today as a "genocide".
The nationalists in the Ukrainian parliament also pushed for the abandonment of the Cyrillic alphabet in favor of the Latin alphabet... This made things even worse, as one can imagine.
In 2014, the Russian-speaking populations of the Donbass felt uncomfortable but, paradoxically, were especially afraid of the reaction of the Russian 'Big Brother'...
Since 2012, in support of the Ukrainian oligarchs of Russian origin in place, then even more in 2014 with the annexing of Crimea and the provision of military support and mercenaries to the pro-Russian separatists of the Oblasts of Luhansk and Donesk, Putin has seamlessly worked to put the issue of cultural and linguistic supremacy at the center of his game of influence ... However, in 2012, among Russian minorities "Many Russian speakers in Ukraine now consider Ukraine as "their country" and are ready to become bilingual. Many Russian speakers have thus become Ukrainians while speaking Russian as their native language."
In 2015 the President of Ukrainian origin Petro Poroshenko made adopt four decommissioning laws, known as "de-communization" (Декомуніза́ція > dekommunizatsia), banning all propaganda about the communist and National Socialist (Nazi) totalitarian regimes in Ukraine. One of the consequences was a profound change in the official toponymy: "provided as a result the change of names of localities, streets or enterprises referring to the communist era. The "Lenin rooms" and "Lenin squares" were then liquidated in enterprises and military units, and the busts of Lenin and other personalities of the Communist Party were removed. In total, therefore, 1320 monuments representing the Communist leader Lenin were dismantled under the order of President Petro Poroshenko in May 2015. The government's clearly stated objective: to get rid of the symbols of the Soviet era and decommunize the country. Despite this policy, communist relics remained erected in the east of the country, still controlled by Kremlin-backed forces."
This could help to explain this quite recent change from 'Kiev' (soviet era toponym) to « Kyiv »
The disputes within the parliament and the Ukrainian political class has probably not helped... However, linguistic disputes have always been an argument for Putin, since 2004, to openly claim a protective status but covertly 'pull the strings' of power in Ukraine. Russia kept repeating since that it reserves the right to intervene in Ukraine "to protect Russian minorities"...